Wednesday, January 05, 2011

To tweet, or not to tweet

I really am late to the whole Twitter thing. I still have friends and colleagues who think it is about folks going around and commenting on their lunch. I probably thought the same for a long time, but am catching up. I still have a long long way to go before I catch up to omni-media Jon Delano who at current count is up to 11,500 tweets and over 2,400 Twitter followers. That is in addition to some TV gig (or gigs) supposedly, radio I hear, teaching, writing a column, even rumors of a family and a life. How in the world does he have time?

Part of this is just a lame excuse to tag on to the story of the day that Pittsburgh Magazine has named Jamie and Ali McMutrie as their Burghers of the Year. Not really actually, but it did remind me about how I really learned about twitter. Hang with me, this all connects. As their story was unfolding, and we were all snowed in and wondering when we would ever see spring again..... the crescendo came as rumors of a mysterous flight to Port au Prince were bouncing around. There was little actual news reporting to corroborate any of it. Who was going, what it was going to do and just about everything else were unknown to most of the public. Sounds like some of it was even unknown to those on the flight.

Then... as I was bored there watching news and watching twitter for the first time because of an escalating case of cottage fever.. It turned out that someone I met when he came through town for G20 was Fox News producer Adam Housley who was 'tweeting' direct from Haiti. Nice guy, and what I remembered he was a big Steelers fan. Specifically he was set up at the Port au Prince airport. I was not expecting anything like this when out of the blue this tweet popped up:

At that point, there was no actual news coverage of the whole flight of Orphan I, nor any confirmation that it really existed. Lots of interest and rumors and all sorts of related activity leading up to that, but the details of all that happened were barely speculated on... and then Governor Ed was standing there before Adam. and we all knew instantly. I still think that is one of the more amazing 'tweets' I have read.

I will still be more shocked if my mother ever tweets. That won't be soon. She sometimes brings up this vague concept of hearing that I am 'on the Internet'. That and I still am waiting for live tweeting of the pension board meetings, but that may happen pretty soon.

As I recall, Cong. Altmire was filmed at Pgh Int'l Airport around 9 in the morning. And by the time that bird was in the air, it was local MSM news -- Wpxi I believe was hammering it heavy. Though the thought just occurred to me it may not have been national (international?) news until Adam's tweet.

I get about 20 times more satisfaction out of Twitter than I do out of Facebook.